Sunday, November 16, 2008

The Great Progress Bar in the Sky

Well I'm really happy about a couple of things... (OK, 3 things)1. Yesterday I made my very first iPhone app! Thanks to a little assistance from my brother, we managed to grok the intricacies of Xcode for building a simple app and test it on the simulator. That was cool. Later I made it pretty, but for what I want to do with it before we submit to Apple, there are several improvements to be made. All of those are mostly aesthetic, but a couple will improve the functionality. So. Cool.

2. I borrowed from my brother the book "Programming in Objective-C" by Stephen G. Kochan. After reading the introduction I'm not touching a C or C++ book until I'm done with the basics of Obj-C and Cocoa Touch. I didn't realize C (and to some extent C++) are procedural. DOH! So while I'm still learning my math at a basic level, I think I need to just dive into OOP, because I've already got years of experience with procedural languages, and a number of scripting languages. Time to get this party started, as they say.

3. Speaking of parties, I just did a happy dance because, despite a lack of clarity in Kochan's book, I managed to write my first app outside of Xcode! You see, the edition of his book I have is for 10.2.6! So instead of using Project Builder (which is an antique by now), I'm going to do all code examples in Terminal and use vi. Unfortunately, I'm not an old hand at UNIX, and vi was seriously pissing me off for a while. But I slogged through it (dusting off the ancient CLI parts of my brain) and managed to write the code, compile it successfully, and execute it. This took about an hour. I am totally jazzed and can't wait to tear through this book.